Months Behind Reviews: 2015

Today I take another crack at the strategy/tactical genre with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. While XCOM falls into a category of games I generally don't favor, some more recent reviews have shown me the potential these types of games have, particularly the excellent Frozen Synapse. With a mixture of feelings that encompass both excitement and caution, I dove into my first ever XCOM game, the results of which are laid out for you bellow.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a strategy game that consists of much more than simply moving soldiers around on a fancy chess board. While the actual combat missions will take up the majority of your playing time in this game, it is far from the most important part. If you wish to successfully guide this U.N. like collection of nations into defeating an alien invasion, you'll need to ensure you maintain a steady stream of upgrades for your soldiers, craft improvements for your air craft, build satellites to protect nations from UFOs, and even play a resource juggling game between the facilities you build and the income gained from protected nations. In short, you need to make sure you win the war, not just the battles.

You only get paid at the end of the month, so you need to balance your upkeep and expansion, resources necessary to progress, use of scientists/engineers, etc.

While planning your research and construction path to ensure your soldiers continued survival is extremely important, most of the time you’re playing this game you’ll be engaged in individual battles. For these you’ll bring 4-6 soldiers/drones of your choosing, selected based on those healthy enough for combat in your barracks, with the class mix you find best (more on all of that later). The actual combat is turned based. You choose an action or series of actions for all your characters, and once you’re done, the enemy does the same. You can use your characters in any order you like, and in a couple of different ways. Each character can move a maximum number of spaces, but gets two moves per turn. Taking any other action, such as attacking, throwing a grenade, etc., ends your turn no matter if you’ve already made a move or not. In this way you can move once, such as to cover, and then attack, but not attack and then move to cover, so you have to carefully weigh where your soldiers will be at the end of a turn, because running out in the open to flank an enemy may seem like a good idea… until his buddies snipe you from around a corner. Another option is “Dashing!” which involves taking both sets of moves at once, effectively ending that character’s turn without further action. The only exception to this is the Assault class, which has an ability called Run and Gun that lets you attack following a Dashing move, though using the ability will then trigger a cool down requiring a few turns before it can be used again.

Combat can be enjoyable, and, depending on the mission type, even nail biting. Note that is a “can be,” but I’ll get into the negatives more later on. Generally it’s a game of chess where you carefully move your soldiers from cover to cover, trying to catch the enemy force that outnumbers you off guard. Rushing into an area blindly, or too far, in the fog of war environment can cause additional enemies to take notice, and what once was a firefight between your soldiers and two rather large brutes is suddenly a massacre in the making as 4-6 reinforcements join the enemy. In certain missions, such as ones that require you to save civilians or defuse bombs, rushing around is more of a must, but something that should still be approached with caution. While it may seems like a good idea to send a few soldiers dashing out in hopes of saving additional civilians, and thus increase the goodwill you’ll foster with that nation, leaving a soldier in an exposed position, or without the cover another soldier can provide with a reaction shot or by suppressing an enemy is a really, really bad call.

This is a terrible spot to be in, because I've alerted far too many enemies.

I’m going to take a moment here and go over some of the mechanics of actually killing stuff here, which I’ve hinted at in the last few paragraphs. XCOM: Enemy Unknown also includes plenty of RPG type elements, probably most noticeable in the soldiers’ classes and leveling systems. Another way that’s incorporated is through the actual chance of hitting a target. Soldiers can only attack targets within line of sight and range, but just because you can attack something doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. There is always a probability associated with connecting an attack. This is impacted by things like cover (full, half, or none) in the direction the attack is coming from, the type of weapon (sniper rifles are high accuracy), range (shotguns require minimum distance to a target). Even if you do everything you can, it seems like there is still a chance of missing, and it is always an especially frustrating case when you miss a shot at near point blank range. Other RPG elements include soldiers skill points, stats that impact things like the likelihood a solider will panic after seeing a comrade die, successfully connect with a psychic attack, or avoid one, are all hugely important. Soldiers who are seriously injured seem to suffer big losses in their will power, which means they are more likely to panic and shoot friendlies when stuff hits the fan. In this way your soldiers can become irreparably broken. All of these are things that impact your ability to be successful on the battlefield, and give the game so much more depth than simply picking off targets, as instead you’ll be dealing with percentages to hit with different weapons, ranges, cover, etc., taking into account things like the status effects of suppression or reaction shots that can take soldiers out of the game even if it’s not the enemy’s turn.

Also of huge importance are the battlefields the missions are fought on, otherwise known as maps. These range from congestion clogged freeways, to creepy shipping docks, to shopping malls, to alien space craft. Challenges for each range from large, open areas without lots of cover, to tightly packed areas where you can’t get a clear shot at an enemy, to ones with lots of height that allow soldiers or enemies on upper levels to effectively snipe everything below (one of my favorite soldiers was a Sniper outfitted with a jetpack, and with abilities that increased her range to include any enemies in an ally’s sight radius, convey an aim bonus when I have the high ground, and having kills against uncovered targets not cost ability points, meaning I could pretty much devastate the battlefield with that one character). Things like how you handle doors, either slowly opening them or bursting through them, make differences in how enemies react. Cars, while providing good cover, will take damage, catch fire, and explode, without a set number of turns elapsing. That last one is especially infuriating, as I lost a few soldiers to that during my second mission in the game because I hadn’t known cars could explode.

As for the missions themselves, well, there are two categories – those that are central to the overall campaign, and those that act as filler the rest of the time. The missions range in type from retrieving a VIP from a hotzone and escorting him out, to moving through a map and disarming bombs, which will give you a few more turns to find another, to rescuing civilians who are being slaughtered by aliens. You’ll encounter all the different mission types in both the campaign and the regular missions, with the campaign working to give you a taste of what you’ll do the rest of the time, as well as splitting the game up into noticeably different chunks where the difficulty increases. While the campaign missions do scale in difficulty, and generally pose a challenge as you advance, throwing things at you that keep up with your gear and soldiers’ levels (or surpass it, if too many of your elite soldiers die), the filler content does not. Yes, it too gets more difficult over time, but it does not stay that way. This is both a good and a bad thing. It’s good if you’ve been losing soldiers and want to level some other characters. It’s a bad thing if you’re just annoyed at the thought have having to kill several enemies with only 3 HP, which you can one shot with your side arm on each character. One mission type that gets particularly annoying are downed UFOs, which first require you to actually down them with your aircraft, a whole different aspect of the game. Since there are penalties to avoiding missions, especially earlier on when 2-3 alerts will come up at a time and the game turns into whack-a-mole as you make a mad attempt to keep countries from panicking to the point that they pull out of the XCOM initiative, thus depriving you of the money you need to do things like expand your base or build gear that would help you survive future alien assaults (you see the vicious cycle, yes?), it is important to keep playing, even if you’ve reached the part where you’re getting bored of going in, blowing away a few baddies, and then calling it a success.

This is bad. Very, very bad.

When you are blowing away baddies, you’ll be able to build a squad from one of several classes (all of these are soldier only, because there are drones you can use as well, but I never messed around with those). Assault, Heavy, Support, and Sniper make up your choices, though in the final third of the game you can also unlock characters with psionic abilities (mind control, etc.). Each class can be leveled up 7 times, with two abilities to choose from at every level except 1 and 6. This is how you diversify your squad. Do you want a Heavy, who carries a rocket launcher and can use the heaviest of weapons, to have rockets that increase the damage a target takes or suppress a target, effectively taking it out of the game that turn? Would you rather your Support carries more, and more potent, med kits or smoke grenades, even though all can carry some. Maybe you’d rather your Assault be able to flush targets from cover instead of firing 2 shots in quick succession on the same turn (with an aim penalty). While there is not a wealth of classes, or, for that matter, abilities to choose from at each level, it is enough to create some variety on your squad. Sure, some games (I’m specifically thinking of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance here) really integrate the RPG elements in with the strategy side of things, XCOM: EU provides less depth but more breadth, largely in part due to the research, upgrades, base management, and aircraft portions of the game.

Eventually you'll progress far enough in that game that you'll unlock some additional abilities in certain characters.

Speaking of those things, because that’s just the way I feel like transitioning paragraphs during this review, I think this would be a great time to talk about research, upgrades, base management, and the aircraft portions of the game. While these aren’t the sections of the game that you’ll spend the most time focused on, they are perhaps the most important part. Research and upgrades are intertwined, and you’ll pull information you get from alien corpses or interrogations of any live alien you manage to capture (not every alien can be interrogated). These will yield things like new blue prints, bonuses, etc., that you absolutely need to advance in this game. Your gear breaks down into three levels, the original gear that you start the game with (basically bullets and Kevlar), the laser medium level, and the plasma advanced level. There are some sidegrades in there that may be appropriate for certain classes, such as psionic armor or jet backs, but I’m not going into those fine details. Rather, just ensure that the upgrades you’ve uncovered and the items you’ve built are keeping pace with you campaign progress, because later enemies have substantially more health, and you’ll need the damage boost on your weapons if you want to actually kill anything.

Little story here. I was playing a very important Terror mission just after moving into the middle of the game. I could have upgraded my gear, but instead focused on getting my base built, particularly satellites (more about all of that in the next paragraph). The thing about Terror missions is that the can greatly change the panic level of a country, either raising it through the roof or lowing it, all depending on how well you do. Mind you, these are the missions where your goal is to save as many citizens as possible (in this particular case, there were 10 civilians to save). The problem was, even though I had 6 characters on the field, I hadn’t upgraded to laser quality weapons yet. So, when I was faced with Chryssalid (fast, deadly enemies that can turn dead civilians or soldiers into zombies) that had more health than I knock off, even with my strongest weapons, without resorting to using multiple soldiers and hoping for the best, I was in serious trouble. Had I just had a few heavy lasers or laser sniper rifles, I would have slaughtered the Chryssalids, rather than the other way around. So, yeah, in addition to keeping your soldiers healthy and generally not dead, proper equipment is key.

The RPG elements play a large part into your success, and there's nothing like making a clutch shot to really lift your spirits.

Upon a little more reflection, I’d say if there is one thing you need more than anything else in this game, it’s a good balance. You must strike a balance between how much you invest in your soldiers (and how many soldiers you invest in for one some inevitably die) and how much you invest in your base, between research and upgrades and how you apply both. Focusing on only one thing will leave you vulnerable elsewhere. For example, deploying satellites is huge in this game, requiring not only the production of the satellite, but building a structure to control them, which itself requires power, and then you get into a whole bonus for adjacent rooms that I’m not going to cover. When you deploy a satellite, you do several things. First, you lower the panic level in that country down to the bottom. Second, that country starts chipping in a lot more funds at the end of each month, the funds you need to do things like build better gear or buy more satellites. Third, you cease abductions in that country, basically locking it down in safemode. Fourth, when you get every country on a continent covered by a satellite, you get that continent’s bonus, such as completing interrogations instantly. These are all great things that you’ll absolutely want to do. But you need to be prepared for the downside as well, that you’ll now be able to detect UFOs that you must shoot down to keep the panic levels from rising. Fine and dandy you say, except that means you need to build and deploy aircraft. That means fighter jets at first, but then better, more durable, equipment as the game progresses. You’ll also need better weapons, special boosters that will allow you to do things like close on a UFO faster, thus increasing the engagement time, make your weapons more accurate, or increase the maneuverability of your aircraft. You handle all of those upgrades at the same time you have to upgrade you soldiers, your base, conduct research, and so on. So yes, I’d say balance is pretty appropriate.

One feature about this game that warrants a bit more discussion is death. I’ve already talked about how soldiers can be seriously injured, and all the negative outcomes associated with it. However, when a character dies (sometimes they are just downed, in which case they need to be revived or stabilized by a Support), that character is really dead. They don’t end up in the infirmary at the end of the mission, they don’t rejoin your party, they are done for. Bye bye. Fininto. And if you’re playing what I call masochist mode, where the game autosaves, they are really, really gone. I’ll be entirely honest about it, that’s not how I went through the game. I disabled autosaving and would instead save at the beginning of missions, then try my best. There is enough random BS in this game, plus that whole thing where I only review a game when I’ve finished it, that I didn’t want to waste time having to restart or rebuild over and over and over again. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t suffer losses, or experience other “bad things,” it just means that when acting in in my best interests I couldn’t stand repeating content over and over and over again because a rocket with 95% accuracy misfired and killed my squad of elite soldiers. Call me what you will because of it.

When something like this happens it can easily ruin your hours of progress.

Part of that is because XCOM: EU is a long game. I mean it’s a looooonnngggg game, even if you’re not losing soldiers left and right. I put 30 hours into the game, just to make sure I had the time to build and research everything I needed. It would have been easier had I not lost a few counties along the way (who cares about the UK or France anyways, which might be telling since I located my base in Germany…), but at least I was able to keep the continent bonus. Still, developing satellites and all the gear you need to succeed in the campaign missions takes forever, so much so that at the end of the game, when you’re just wishing the globe would spin a little faster, it gets boring. Really boring. And that’s when you start to notice some of the issues in the game.

Yeah, there is a special mode you unlock after beating the game that makes it take even longer. I do not recommend that.

Things like the lack of map variety, particularly anything UFO related, make this game’s grind apparent. I’ve probably played each UFO map 20-30 times, just starting in a different area around the ship to give a different perspective and hope you don’t notice that there are only 15 or so maps in the game (thank you, Frozen Synapse, for your map generator that would keep things fresh even as I had to constantly replay levels due to my failing). While UFO maps are probably the most notorious, given that once you get satellites up everywhere it will be you most common mission type, the same criticism can be leveled at every other area in the game – you will replay the same map many, many times. Given the number of hours required to beat this game (took me 30), a little more variety in the map department would have been very welcome.

Perhaps the most annoying bug in this game is one that almost comical in its badness – the camera! Aiming things such as rockets is a nightmare as the camera jumps around. Sure, if you can line everything up on a specific square you can take out 3-4 enemies in one blast, but the camera will instead collide with things like the edge of the building you’re looking over, or the halve cover ledge, or the log, or some other object that makes precision aiming a complete pain to deal with, despite its usefulness when you get it right. Had they just fixes this and the lack of map diversity, I think my final issue with the game would have evaporated.

As you can see, many people just opt to cheat and have an incredible number of scientists and engineers.

What is that final issue you might ask? Duration. Don’t get me wrong, I love a long game full of content that doesn’t fail to satisfy. RPGs can be like this, but they are by no means the only example. The problem with XCOM is in order to accomplish everything you need to – the interrogations, research, construction, training, etc. – to successfully complete the game requires an incredibly large amount of time (unless you’re cheating on the number of scientists and engineers you have, which I found out at the end of the game when it gives you a print of how you did compared to other players), and in that time there’s not a lot else to do. Once you get things on lock down satellite wise, and have enough solid soldiers that you’re not likely to lose anyone on a routine mission, the game becomes very easy and very, very repetitive (again, maps, but also the type of missions you’ll play). Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution or suggestion for what could have been done to make the game more bearable at the end, or something that would make the challenge continue to scale, even for the filler content, and that’s something that really should have been addressed.

So that’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It’s a pretty good game that’s worth about $5-$7.50 of your hard earned cash, and that will require plenty of your time (again, in my case, about 30 hours). While much of the game is very solid, after a while you’ll find that it just tends to drag on and lacks the diversity needed to sustain such a long game. The combat, balance, and all those features – solid. The longevity or the possibility of wanting to replay the game, even with new variations, after playing it once – not so much. Because, ultimately, the biggest problem with the game is the filler, and you’ll find, as I did, that it leaves you hollow – 7 out of 10.